Smilegate’s MMO phenomenon has received a wave of negative reviews on Steam, and for a very specific reason.
Several hours of waiting to enter the game, it is now the daily life of many users of Lost Ark. After a phenomenal arrival in Europe and America this weekend, Smilegate’s free-to-play MMO straight from Korea has been a victim of its international success. To the point of overtaking Dota 2 and CS:GO to rise to second place among the most popular titles on the platform, just behind the unbeatable PUBG Battlegrounds. Faced with the craze, Amazon Games had already preferred to postpone the release for a few hours to avoid any technical problems. Now accessible, the title still has to deal with endless queues.
Reviews serial bombing on Steam
Faced with a particularly frustrating situation, many users flocked to the product page of Lost Ark on Steam, in order to skyrocket the overall rating of the game. A successful operation, since in barely two days, the title went from an evaluation “extremely positive” at “medium”. Of the 64,000 comments posted at the time of writing, over 20,000 were negative. In the end, the ratio of positive evaluations reached just 68%, a fairly low score for a game of this magnitude.
However, almost no one criticizes the game as such. On the contrary, the majority of the opinions regret the slowness of the servers and the long hours of waiting imposed before being able to survey the landscapes of Arkésia.
Amazon promises compensation
Faced with this wave of criticism, the debate was quickly revived on social networks, with many wondering about the interest of such a practice. However, the dissatisfaction of the players has obviously paid off: Amazon Games Studios, which takes care of the distribution of the game in the West, announced the imminent launch of a new region intended to welcome European players. As a reminder, when it was launched the game had 9 servers in the central region (Europe), which quickly had to be reinforced with 10 additional servers. (https://cashcofinancial.com) All display full when trying to launch the game.
However, this announcement will only solve part of the problem, since it will not be possible to transfer an existing character to the new server. For their part, the developers have promised a slew of ingame compensation, just to calm the most unhappy.
